Quencell Howard

“Sade's ultimate achievement was to make sex the choicest expression of obscene cruelty and absolute, despotic power.”
― David Coward, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“You must also know clearly what you want out of the situation, and be prepared to clearly articulate your desire. It’s a good idea to tell the person you are confronting exactly what you would like them to do instead of what they have done or currently are doing. You might think, “if they loved me, they would know what to do.” That’s the voice of resentment. Assume ignorance before malevolence. No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs—not even you. If you try to determine exactly what you want, you might find that it is more difficult than you think. The person oppressing you is likely no wiser than you, especially about you. Tell them directly what would be preferable, instead, after you have sorted it out. Make your request as small and reasonable as possible—but ensure that its fulfillment would satisfy you. In that manner, you come to the discussion with a solution, instead of just a problem. Agreeable, compassionate, empathic, conflict-averse people (all those traits group together) let people walk on them, and they get bitter. They sacrifice themselves for others, sometimes excessively, and cannot comprehend why that is not reciprocated. Agreeable people are compliant, and this robs them of their independence. The danger associated with this can be amplified by high trait neuroticism. Agreeable people will go along with whoever makes a suggestion, instead of insisting, at least sometimes, on their own way. So, they lose their way, and become indecisive and too easily swayed. If they are, in addition, easily frightened and hurt, they have even less reason to strike out on their own, as doing so exposes them to threat and danger (at least in the short term). That’s the pathway to dependent personality disorder, technically speaking.198 It might be regarded as the polar opposite of antisocial personality disorder, the set of traits characteristic of delinquency in childhood and adolescence and criminality in adulthood. It would be lovely if the opposite of a criminal was a saint—but it’s not the case. The opposite of a criminal is an Oedipal mother, which is its own type of criminal.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“If Sade's books are the kind which the French inelegantly describe as needing to be read with one hand, it is a sensible precaution to hold a sick-bowl in the other.”
― David Coward, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“It is hard to imagine a story more sympathetic to mere mortals. If God Himself experiences doubts in the midst of His self-imposed agony, how could we mere humans not fall prey to the same failing? And it is possible that it was compassion that was driving the antinatalist Benatar’s position. I saw no evidence that Benatar was malevolent in any obvious manner. He appeared to truly believe—in a manner I found reminiscent of Goethe’s Mephistopheles—that the combination of consciousness, vulnerability, and mortality is so dire that there is simply no moral excuse for its continuance. Now, it is entirely possible that Mephistopheles’s opinion is not to be trusted. Since he is Satan himself, there is no reason to assume that the argument he puts forward to justify his adversarial stance toward Being is valid, or even that he himself truly believes it. And perhaps the same was true of Benatar, who was and is no doubt prey to the frailties that characterize each of us (and that certainly includes me, despite the stance I took in opposition to him). But I believed then and still firmly believe now that the consequences of his self-negating position are simply too dire. It leads directly to an antilife or even an anti-Being nihilism so profound that its manifestation could not help but exaggerate and amplify the destructive consequences of existence that are already the focus of the hypothetically compassionate antinatalists themselves (and I am not being sarcastic or cynical about the existence of that compassion, misplaced though I believe it to be).”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life